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AUTHORS ON MUSEUMS: IT'S ALL ABOUT SPACE

For the third piece in our series, the novelist Anthony Horowitz picks his local museum: Tate Modern ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

It seems almost superfluous to be writing about Tate Modern, which is hardly one of London’s more unexpected pleasures. You’ll find it on just about any list of the top ten tourist sites in the city, holding its own against the Tower of London and Madame Tussauds—not bad for an institution that boasts “Ideas & Objects: Around Minimalism” as one of its attractions. Five million people passed through its doors in the year after it opened, in May 2000, and they have been pouring in ever since. The building itself, a disused power station on the south bank of the Thames, has become one of the principal landmarks of 21st-century London, which in itself has a certain irony. It was originally designed by Giles Gilbert Scott who also created that other very English icon, the red telephone box, winning a competition in 1924.

I’ve chosen the Tate Modern first because it is my local art gallery, a short stroll from my home in Clerkenwell. And what a walk it is. Through the old meat market at Smithfield, across the modern but very pleasing Paternoster Square, past St Paul’s and over the Millennium Bridge (still known as the Wobbly Bridge because of a design fault when it opened, a name that may stick for ever). The Tate is all about space—and the space it sits in is itself remarkable, with the great expanse of the Thames stretching out at the front, an uncluttered sky behind and even the suggestion of a park to one side–small, but still a rarity in this part of town.

What sets the Tate apart from any other gallery in London, and possibly the world, is its vast Turbine Hall, which once housed the building’s power generators. When it opened, there were doubts that such a huge area could ever be adapted to display art. In the event, it has been a triumph. In what must be one of the most successful acts of corporate sponsorship ever, Unilever supported a series of original installations which have all become talking points and vivid memories.

Were you here for Olafur Eliasson’s “Weather Project” in 2003, when hundreds of us lay on our backs, gazing at a splendiferous, glowing, artificial sun? Or in 2002, when Anish Kapoor unveiled his vast sculpture “Marsyas”, which stretched the entire 500ft length of the hall like some mythic, orchestral horn?

My own favourite was more recent. In 2007 the Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo constructed what appeared to be a huge crack in the museum floor, as if the place had been hit by an earthquake. “Shibboleth”, as it was called, exemplified everything that Tate Modern stands for. First, there was the visceral impact. It was jaw-dropping. But it also raised many questions about the nature of art and our response to it. Was this a piece about racism and colonialism, as its name implied? Did it “ask questions about the interaction of sculpture and space”, as the museum notes suggested? Did it matter what it was about if it pulled in the crowds?

And it certainly did that. I loved the fact that 15 people were so entranced by the exhibit that they fell into it and the health and safety executive had to be called in. There was even talk of “Shibboleth” being closed, but somehow the gallery won through. I visited several times and noticed people breaking into smiles as they entered the Turbine Hall, crouching down, talking to complete strangers—not typical London behaviour. There was a certain magic in the air. The whole piece was a sort of conjuring trick and to this day nobody is quite sure how it was achieved: did they cut down into the floor, or did they somehow raise it?

A year before, Carsten Höller had used the Turbine Hall for “Test Site”, a series of helter-skelter slides that had children queuing next to businessmen to spiral down, and again we had that weird collision between art and entertainment, the gallery and the fairground. Tate Modern fully intends to straddle both worlds. It has American-style tours several times a day introducing groups to a sprinkling of artworks at high speed. It has TV monitors that invite you to take pictures of paintings on your mobile phone and then text them for public display. And it has video games that allow you to score points by constructing an ugly woman in the style of Picasso’s “Guernica” (mine wasn’t ugly enough). But with its cracks, slides, giant spiders, dinosaur skeletons, endless merchandising and heavy self-branding, the question does arise: can one take this place seriously?

Visiting Tate Modern, I am reminded of an advertising slogan that the Saatchis created for the Victoria & Albert Museum back in the 1980s: “an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”. There was quite an outcry at the time, a sense of the new barbarism and perhaps the first step in what has now come to be known as “dumbing down”. The real trouble was that the caption expressed what many people thought but were too polite to say. It was true. Food in London’s public places had begun to improve dramatically in the 1980s (it had been terrible before). And cultural elitism had begun to tumble down.

As it happens, Tate Modern has a wonderful café with some of the best views in London. It also has an excellent restaurant on the top floor which is open late on Friday and Saturday evenings, another good idea that may have been imported from America. And while we’re on the subject, I can recommend the shop on the ground floor with a superb range of books as well as gifts you might actually want to buy and a few you might not. It’s hard to believe that Mark Rothko, for one, could have lent his name to so many accessories.

But what of the art—outside the headline-grabbing Unilever series? What about the permanent collection scattered across the building’s seven floors? (Beware of the escalators, by the way. For some reason, I always find they take me somewhere I didn’t want to go.) There is a curious modern trend of having public buildings which are in every way superior to the art that they display. Look at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, or the Getty Centre in Los Angeles—the architecture and the location are amazing, but I can’t remember a thing that was inside.

It’s probably fair to say that there is a shortage of world masterpieces at Tate Modern and some surprising omissions from a collection that is supposed to cover art since 1900. On my last visit, I don’t think I saw anything by Paul Klee, Yves Tanguy or Marcel Duchamp, to name just three artists who surely had a part to play. There was no David Hockney, Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud or Bridget Riley (four personal favourites). Nor were any of the so-called Brit-pack in evidence—Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gilbert & George, Tracey Emin et al. All these artists have been championed by the Turner prize, which is organised by the Tate—so you’d expect to see one or two of their works on permanent display.

And I have to admit that I still don’t understand the way the permanent collection is laid out. I wander past a rather sad Kandinsky and a couple of fairly indifferent paintings by Mondrian. Suddenly, I find myself in a Polish experimental video installation from 1970 which in turn plunges me into a three-dimensional installation by Sol Lewitt. There is no escaping this route. It’s somehow prescribed and I find myself almost being bullied by the curators who seem to want me to see art in a certain way. Their way.

Where I’d be perfectly happy with simply chronology, it’s all about juxtaposition, with labels striving a little too hard to capture the big idea. “Ideas & Object”, “States of Flux”, “Material Gestures” and so on. So, for example, Roy Liechtenstein’s celebrated “WHAAM!” from 1963, one of the gallery’s best-known paintings, is set against Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture from 50 years earlier, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”. Why? Because they both “address the chaos and violence of their respective eras”. Because they are both about speed and dynamism. This is all very well and it may be good to see art in a different way, but sometimes the juxtapositions are unhelpful. I’m not sure that setting Monet opposite Jackson Pollock does either of them any favours. And the three plastic arms coming out of the wall in Hitler salutes (“Ave Maria” by Maurizio Cattelan) opposite paintings by Cézanne, Bonnard and Matisse are plain silly. Yes, we all know that fascism was exploding in Europe in the 1920s, but so was frozen food, so why not throw in a few fish fingers?

Even so, ambling through the galleries is still a pleasure, with occasional surprises to remind you why you’re there. Can this really be the pile of 120 firebricks (Carl Andre, “Equivalent VIII”) that so scandalised the press when the Tate bought them in 1972? Braque and Picasso make occasional, satisfying appearances. And here’s “The Snail” by Matisse which I’m sure was on my wall, and many other walls, when I was a student.

The greatest pleasure of all is the space, which is where I began. Some of the galleries may be a little cluttered and old-fashioned (the surrealist collection in particular), but turn a corner and the scale of Tate Modern suddenly comes into its own. While Kandinsky is a bit lost in a corner, Ellsworth Kelly gets a whole room to himself and his large-scale abstract expressionist paintings from the 1960s and 1970s—“Red White”, “Black Square with Blue”—couldn’t be better hung, with the colours brilliant against the huge plains of white. The space often flatters the installations it encloses. I have a feeling that “Lightning with Stag in its Glare” by Josef Beuys might be taken away for scrap if it were left out in the street, but in its setting, a room reminiscent of Grand Central Station with its three narrow windows and skylights, it has more power and prestige than it perhaps deserves.

/>The generous dimensions also play a part in the brilliant temporary exhibitions which draw me time and again across the Wobbly Bridge. Most recently it was Rothko, not an artist I’ve ever much liked but one whom I understood better after this beautifully lit and economical show centring on the Tate’s own Seagram murals. Running at the same time was the first major retrospective of the Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Mereles, which had to be seen to be believed, with one work, “How to Build Cathedrals”, consisting of a tower of communion wafers on 600,000 coins. This is what Tate Modern does so well. It turns a name you’ve never heard of into one you won’t forget.

And having complained that there’s no Hopper on permanent display, I still recall with pleasure the superb retrospective Tate Modern mounted five years ago, bringing together famous works like “Automat” and “Nighthawks” (with some remarkable preparatory sketches) and the lovely “New York Pavements” (a nun pushing a pram) which we may never see again. More than 400,000 people visited that exhibition, but I still remember the sense of light and space which the paintings, each one a miniature world, cried out for—and were given.

At some point in my lifetime, librarians stopped being grey-haired tyrants who glared at you if you sneezed, opera houses agreed to let you in if you weren’t wearing a tie, bookshops allowed you to look at books before you bought them and art galleries realised that they didn’t need to be revered. Tate Modern is aptly named. Every day the Tate engages with a young, fresh crowd, blurring the line between art and entertainment and making it perfectly clear that what it offers in abundance is both.

TATE MODERN IN A NUTSHELL

When to go  Now—the south bank of the Thames blossoms in spring when the wind has lost its bite. Opening hours are 10am to 6pm Sunday to Thursday, 10am to 10pm Friday and Saturday. Entrance to the permanent collection is free.

How to get there  Ferries go from Embankment or Festival Pier, and the Tate’s own boat runs to Tate Britain and the London Eye every 40 minutes. Nearest Tube stations: Southwark and Blackfriars, both ten minutes’ walk.

What’s on  “Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism” runs to May 17th and “Roni Horn aka Roni Horn” to May 25th. “Futurism”, marking the centenary of Marinetti’s manifesto, opens June 12th. Book online or become a member of all four Tates from £50 a year.

~ Alexandra Lennox

(Anthony Horowitz has written several bestsellers for young readers including the Alex Rider stories, and created the ITV series "Foyle's War".)

Picture Credit: Intelligent Life, Kieran Lynam, simiant, bru76, Mark Hillary (all via Flickr)